Results for “best non-fiction” 154 found
The new Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez biography
One day [Alvaro] Mutis climbed the seven flights of stairs, carried two books into the apartment without saying hello, slapped them down on the table, and roared: "Stop fucking about and read that vaina, so you'll learn how to write!" Whether all GarcÃa Márquez's friends really swore all the time during these years we will never know — but in his anecdotes they do. The two slim books were a novel entitled Pedro Páramo, which had been published in 1955, and a collection of stories entitled The Burning Plain (El llano en llamas), published in 1953. The writer was the Mexican Juan Rulfo. GarcÃa Márquez read Pedro Páramo twice the first day, and The Burning Plain the next day. He claims that he had never been so impressed by anything since he had first read Kafka; that he learned Pedro Páramo, literally, by heart; and that he read nothing else for the rest of the year because everything else seemed so inferior.
That is from the new and noteworthy Gerald Martin biography of GarcÃa Márquez. This very impressive (and enjoyable) book was seventeen years in the making. It's also not a bad way to learn about the political and economic history of northern Colombia. This should make any short list of either the best non-fiction books this year or the best literary biographies. The reader also learns the probable origins of the famed spat with Mario Vargas Llosa (p.375); it had to do with a woman, namely Vargas Llosa's wife.
The Superorganism
The subtitle is The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies and that is the new book by Bert Hölldobler and Edmund O. Wilson.
This is another plausible candidate for best non-fiction book of the year. I liked this paragraph:
Here is another good bit:
Whenever two kinds or organisms live in close mutualistic symbiosis, as is the case in leaf-cutting ants and their fungus, we should expect communication between the two mutualists. The fungus may signal to its host ants its preference for particular vegetable substrates or the need for a change in diet to maintain nutritional diversity or even the presence of a harmful substrate.
Here is a New York Times review of the book. The photos are wonderful too. Here is a short paper on the work of Barlow and Proschan and the general topic of "reliability"; it has implications for the financial crisis as well.
Europe Between the Oceans
Can you say longue durée? If so (or if not), here’s the new book by Barry Cunliffe, with the subtitle 9000 B.C.-AD 1000 indicating a coverage of murky yet critical millennia.
It’s a history of Europe which blends economic geography and economic archaeology. The underlying question is how Europe became so innovative and the answer has much to do with trade and migration. Imagine a more balanced and grounded Braudel. The explanation of the "Neolithic package" and its spread across Europe is stunning. I loved it when the author broke away from a passage about Phoenician trade routes to explain some odd lines in Homer. If you are wondering, Cunliffe is a moderate neo-migrationist. The photography and the color plates of the art are lovely. You can learn how to view the Roman Empire as an "interlude" and as a break from the major story and how to understand 800-1000 A.D. as a period of rebalancing. And you get passages like this:
…the actual return in calorific value for the effort expended in collecting [shellfish] is comparatively small. A single red deer would be worth fifty thousand oysters! That said, the value of shellfish is that they are always available and can be substituted when other food sources run short.
If you enjoy early economic history, this is a must, noting that it does not have the titillating feel of a popular science book. It is my pick for best non-fiction book of the year so far.
Here is the book’s home page. Here is one short review. Here is a Times review. You can buy an excellent long review (LRB) here.
Buy the book here (at $26 the per page price is low) to learn why economic archaeology should win a Nobel Prize someday.
Bottomfeeder
The author is Taras Grescoe and the subtitle is "How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood," buy it here. Yes this is one of the best non-fiction books this year so far and yes I say that after having read (and mostly liked) the last five books on the exact same topic. I hope it does well because this book is an object lesson in how to best your competitors and we’ll see whether or not that matters.
Did you know that the average cell membrane of an American is now only 20 percent omega-3-based fats? In Japan it is 40 percent.
Or did you know that American sushi restaurants promising you "red snapper" are usually serving tilapia or perhaps sea bream.
The book has a superb explanation of how "frozen at sea" fish are now better, safer and tastier than "fresh fish," including for sushi.
English fish and chips was originated by Jewish merchants in Soho, drawing upon the same Portuguese traditions that led to tempura in Japan.
The Japanese are experimenting with acupuncture to keep fish alive and "relaxed" on their way from the ocean to being eaten.
Two of the practical takeaways from the book are a) if only for selfish reasons, do not eat most Asian-farmed shrimp, and b) eat more sardines. They are, by the way, very good with butter on sourdough bread.
This is one of the best single topic food books of the last five years. It is historical, practical, ethical, and philosophical, all at once.
I hate perfume
I really, really do. All perfume, and yes that means yours too. But I loved the book Perfumes: The Guide, by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez. If you are rating this book along the single dimension of how skillfully it informs the reader, it is one of the best non-fiction books I have read, ever.
Plus it has good sentences like:
Nobody ever died from wearing Mitsouko, but lots of babies were born as a result of it.
And:
Fragrances for men are mostly identical crap, designed to trap you and give you away as a lout.
Recommended.
How to prepare for your trips, culturally
At this point in life the answer is usually that I do nothing other than call up memories of previous cultural consumption. If you are not at that point, Wikipedia is an excellent source for fiction and movies from a country. When it comes to music, consult the various Rough Guides to music; I mean the books, not the mediocre CD collections or the so-so travel guides. Also try the AllMusic guide, either paper or on-line; when it comes to music neither Amazon nor Wikipedia is to be trusted ("why not?" is an interesting question, is it because too many people feel entitled to have an opinion about music?). Bring music on cassette, CD, or iPod, as soundtrack for your trip, and ask your driver to put on Radio East Africa. Finding the best non-fiction books is the hardest category to master. I still prefer shelf browsing at libraries and book superstores.
An MR request is another option. Matt Dreyer asks what I recommend for a trip to Greece and Turkey. Offhand I’ll say Herodotus, the usual Greek classics, Pamuk’s Snow and Istanbul books, Sarkan (a Turkish singer), Sufi music, Greek traditional music from 1930-1950 (there are some wonderful collections, look for the word rembetika), a study of Turkish and also Greek textiles, a picture book on Cycladic art, a book on Greek sculpture at the National Museum in Athens, Norwich on the Byzantine empire, Michael Grant on the ancient world, Lord Kinross on the Ottoman centuries, a biography of Ataturk and there are a few good recent books which survey contemporary Turkey.
Your tips, either general or specific, are of course welcome.
The Essential Norman Mailer
It is easy to hate his self-important puffery, but Norman Mailer remains one of America’s best writers. His books include:
1. The Naked and the Dead – Outdated, but still full of powerful writing, and lacking many of the later objectionable mannerisms.
2. Advertisements for Myself – A collection of journalism, a mixed bag, but the peaks are high.
3. Armies of the Night – About the 1968 Chicago Convention, I’ve never read it but it gets consistent raves.
4. Of a Fire on the Moon – The story of America’s space program, and one of the best non-fiction books period. As a writer, one of the books I most envy.
5. The Executioner’s Song – The story of Gary Gilmore, the first half is incredible — a candidate for "The Great American Novel" — although the second half meanders.
5. Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery – I usually hate historical fiction but this is gripping.
6. Harlot’s Ghost – His best book, 1168 pages of panache and joy. One of the most underrated and underread of the important American novels.
The thing is, he has many other books too. His new The Castle in the Forest, a psychological autobiography of the young Hitler, is better than his bad books but it does not compare to the books on this list.
What should I ask Annie Jacobsen?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with her. From Wikipedia:
Annie Jacobsen (born June 28, 1967) is an American investigative journalist, author, and a 2016 Pulitzer Prize finalist. She writes for and produces television programs, including Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan for Amazon Studios, and Clarice for CBS. She was a contributing editor to the Los Angeles Times Magazine from 2009 until 2012.
Jacobsen writes about war, weapons, security, and secrets. Jacobsen is best known as the author of the 2011 non-fiction book Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base, which The New York Times called “cauldron-stirring.”[ She is an internationally acclaimed and sometimes controversial author who, according to one critic, writes sensational books by addressing popular conspiracies.
I very much liked her book Nuclear War: A Scenario. Do read the Wikipedia entry for a full look at what she has written. So what should I ask her?
What I’ve been reading
Owen Hatherley, Militant Modernism. A very good short book, defending “left wing modernism,” a much maligned target on the right these days. Hatherley himself is a much underrated figure, a commie who came along at the wrong time but a very good writer and thinker about aesthetics.
Stuart A. Reid, The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination. For whatever reason, there are more good books about the Congo than most other parts of Africa. This is one of them. From 2023, but good enough to make a “best of non-fiction” list for a typical year. Very cleanly written as well.
Charles Callan Tansill, The Purchase of the Danish West Indies. Who would have thought that this 1966 volume, and Tansill, would be making a comeback? The biggest lesson for me here was how much the purchase was a live issue as early as 1867. And as the final purchase approached in 1917, the other European powers were by no means happy.
Richard Overy, Rain of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima, and the Surrender of Japan is a short but very good and substantive look at the non-nuclear and also nuclear bombing campaigns.
Michael Krielaars, The Sound of Utopia: Musicians in the Time of Stalin. A surprisingly fresh and substantive book, which also does a good job integrating the first-person perspective of the author. I’ve read the standard biographies of Shostokovich, Prokofiev, and the like, and still learned a lot from this one.
There is Gregor Craigie, Our Crumbling Foundation: How We Solve Canada’s Housing Crisis.
Molly Worthen, Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History From the Puritans to Donald Trump is a very good book on an underexplored topic. In some ways tech has mattered less than you might think.
Stephen Witt, The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip. A fun and well-informed look at its subject matter. There should be more books on one of the world’s most valuable companies, and yes here supply is elastic.
Marc Hijink, Focus: The ASML Way, Inside the Power Struggle Over the Most Complex Machine on Earth. You have to already want to read a book about ASML, but this is in fact the relevant book about ASML. To call it boring is to miss the point, because the company itself is somewhat boring.
Jeanette zu Furstenberg, Wie gut wir sind, zeigt sich in Krisenzeiten: Ein Weckruf. Exactly the wake-up call Germany needs.
Rainer Zitelmann, The Origins of Poverty and Wealth: My World Tour and Insights from the Global Libertarian Movement is a kind of travel memoir from a man who has become one of our most prolific writers on behalf of liberty.
And I was reading my own short commentary on Atlas Shrugged, from a few years ago.
What I’ve been reading
1. Eric Ambler, The Night-Comers. (U.S. editions are sometimes titled State of Siege.) Think of Ambler as a precursor of Le Carré. I used to think he had one or two excellent works, now I am realizing his ouevre is much deeper than I had imagined. Just long enough at 158 pp., this novel uses the Sundanese setting very well. He was a favorite of Graham Greene’s, and I will read yet more by him.
2. Lydia Davis, Our Strangers, not on Amazon try these sources. Very very short fiction, sometimes as short as a single paragraph. With some periodic non-fiction (or is it?) thrown in. The best pieces are excellent, and many of the others are at least interesting. Here is my earlier CWT with Lydia Davis, I am a fan.
3. Alexandra Hudson, The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves. Highly intelligent, and today much needed. Her opening sentence is: “Did you know there are at least four women named Judith who are internationally renowned experts on manners?” I would say that Alexandra is one of my “dark horse” picks to become a leading classical liberal influencer, except maybe she isn’t a dark horse any more.
4. Amitav Ghosh, Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories. An extremely well-written, and also useful history of the opium trade, albeit with more than its fair share of left-wing jargon. And yes that is the novelist Ghosh. Due out in February.
The other books I’ve been reading I haven’t so much liked.
*Medieval Horizons: Why the Middle Ages Matter*
Ian Mortimer is the author of this excellent book, here was one of my favorite bits:
It may seem preposterous today to describe a 5 mph increase in the maximum land speed as revolutionary. It sounds like someone pointing to a hillock and calling it a mountain. But it was revolutionary, for a number of reasons. Like a one-degree rise in average global temperature, it represents a huge change. This is because it is not a one-off event but a permanent doubling of the maximum potential speed. By 1600 the fastest riders could cover 150 miles in a day and individual letters carried by teams of riders could travel at speeds of up to 200 miles per day. This significantly reduced the time it took to inform the government about the goings-on in the realm. If the Scots attacked Berwick when the king was at Winchester, and the news came south at 40 miles per day, as it is likely to have done in the eleventh century, it would have taken nine days to arrive. After the king had deliberated what to do, if only for a day, the response would have travelled back at the same speed — so the north of the kingdom would have been without royal instructions for almost three weeks. If, however, the post could carry the news at 200 miles per day, the king and his advisers could decide on a response in less than two days. After a day’s discussion, the king’s instructions would have been back in the Berwick area less than five days after the danger had arisen — two weeks faster than in the eleventh century.
It is hard to exaggerate the political and social implications of such a change. The rapid delivery of information allowed a king far greater control over his realm…The rise in travelling speeds subtle shifted the balance of power away from territorial lords and towards central government.
The speed of information thus created a demand for more information.
That meant, among other things, more spies. And there was this:
Looked at simply as a statistic, an increase in speed of 5 mph is not very impressive. In terms of the cultural horizons explored in this book, however, it is profoundly important. Imagine the rings spreading out from where you are now — the first ring marking the limit of how far you can travel in one day, with a further ring beyond it marketing two days, and then a yet further ring marking three days. Now imagine all those moving further and further outwards, each one twice as far…you haven’t just doubled or trebled the area you could cover in one, two or three days, you’ve increased it exponentially…With the collective horizon also increasing exponentially, you can see how a doubling of the distances people could travel in a day had a huge impact on the nation’s understanding of itself and what was going on within and beyond its borders.
Interesting throughout, this one will make the year’s “best of non-fiction” list. You can buy it here.
Thursday assorted links
1. Marc Thiessen on the best things Biden did in 2022. Not all will approve, but a perspective you don’t usually hear.
2. The famous pupils of Hawick High School in Scotland.
3. How easy is it to convert office space into apartments? (NYT, can’t say I am convinced by the pessimism but interesting).
4. New Mark Calabria book on mortgage policy during the pandemic.
5. My most liked tweets of 2022.
6. A weird essay about Captain Kirk, link now fixed. Too weird, as it should be.
7. Magnus shows up 2.5 minutes late for a 3-minute blitz games against a strong GM. And wins (video).
*Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne*
This new book by Katherine Rundell, now out in the UK but still pending in the United States for September, is one of the very best studies of an individual poet I ever have read. The book’s style is so energetic and so carefully crafted as a whole, it is difficult to excerpt from. What is striking to me is that the blurbs are from super-smart people, and they all are literally accurate (has that ever been the case?). So for instance Claire Tomalin wrote:
Katherine Rundell’s brave and detailed new biography of John Donne is just the book we need…Every page sparkles…
Simon Jenkins wrote:
Rundell has a wonderful touch, light yet profound, which perfectly suits her extraordinary subject…Unmissable.
The great Maggie O’Farrell wrote:
A wonderful, joyous piece of work…with fierce, interrogative intelligence. I just loved it.
All true! Recommended, a sure thing for the year’s best of non-fiction list. You don’t even have to like poetry, as a history book it is first-rate as well.
What I’ve been reading
1. Ian Morris, Geography is Destiny: Britain and the World: A 10,000 Year History. None of the book is bad, and half is quite interesting. Think of the treatment as “Deep Roots for Brexit,” though willing to noodle over earlier and more interesting topics in history. From a good FT review by Chris Allnutt: “Morris succeeds in condensing 10,000 years into a persuasive and highly readable volume, even if there are moments that risk a descent into what he seeks to avoid: “a catalogue of men with strange names killing each other”, as historian Alex Woolf put it.” Now if only he would explain why their hot and cold water taps don’t run together…
2. Michel Houellebecq, Interventions 2020. Grumpy non-fiction essays, with plenty of naive anti-consumerism. You need to read them if you are a fan, but I didn’t find so much here of interest. I was struck by his nomination of Paul McCartney (!) as the most essential musician, with Schubert next in line. Mostly it is MH being contrary. He has earned the right, but he wasn’t able to make me care more.
3. Frank O’Connor, “Guests of the Nation.” One of the best short stories I have read, Irish. Can’t say any more without spoilers! 11 pp. at the link.
4. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest. Has anyone done a systematic accounting of which Vietnam era fictional works have held up and which not? Maybe this one gets a B+? Not top drawer Le Guin, but good enough to read, and better yet if you catch the cross-cultural references and all the anthropological background works.
5. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, some cheap paperback edition. I did a quick, non-studied reread of this, in prep for the new Cambridge University Press reissue edition due out June 30, which has excellent notes and I will study and reread in more detail. One of the very best books! Not only is the story fully engaging and deeply humorous, but it is one of the seminal tracts on progress (largely skeptical), a blistering take on political correctness, wise on the virtues and pitfalls of travel, and one of the first novels to truly engage with science and politics and their interaction. Straussian throughout. Swift is one of the very greatest thinkers and writers and his output has held up remarkably well.
Monday assorted links
1. Kevin Kelly lists some heresies.
3. World’s largest cast-iron skillet travels down a Tennessee highway. And the now-deleted thread on Big Tech, work from home, loneliness, Covid, etc.
5. The variability and volatility of sleep.
6. More Chris Blattman non-fiction recommendations.
7. “Even according to exaggerated figures, China’s total fertility rate in 2021 was only 1.1-1.2, far below the 1.8 forecast by Chinese State Council in 2016, the 1.6-1.7 forecast by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in 2019, the 1.7 forecast by UN in 2019” Link here.